The proliferation of video sharing through video hosting websites provides numerous opportunities to collaborate and experience videos in online communities. Video hosting websites allow users to upload, view, comment on and rate videos. Users browsing a video hosting website can locate videos of interest by, for example, searching for videos, browsing directories, or sorting by ratings.
Comments provide a way to complement video with useful information. Comments can be of various data types, including text, audio, graphics, or other forms. However, comments have been used to provide information about an entire video, rather than a specific portion. If a user wants to direct others to a specific portion of the video, the user has to enter the time offset for that point in the comments, such as “see stunt at 1:48.” Other users would then have to traverse through the subject video to the 1 minute, 48 second mark and then view from there to understand the comment.
In addition, the content contained in comments may be unreliable. Difficulty arises in ascertaining the trustworthiness of the author of the comments. Also, a large number of comments may hinder understanding of the information to be conveyed through such comments. Moreover, it is difficult to know which comments associated with a video are related. For example, unless all of the comments are associated with the identical time-elapsed place in the video, there is uncertainty as to whether the comments refer to the same portion of a video.
Further, users may want to create their own comments to highlight certain aspects of video. Personalized comments may raise security concerns, and challenges in determining how and with whom such bookmarks should be shared. In addition, if personalized comments are examined in isolation, they provide only minimal meaning to related groups of users that also have comments. Such personalized comments are also difficult to retrieve and locate by both the user and those persons with whom the comments have been shared.